The Marathon is Cancelled—Finally

The drinking water in Breezy Point, Queens, an area absolutely devastated by Hurricane Sandy, is no longer safe to drink. But as of Friday afternoon, Mayor Bloomberg was saying that the I.N.G. New York City Marathon was still on. For days now, residents in housing projects in the Lower East Side have been relying on fire hydrants for their water—and the elderly and disabled, who can’t get up and down the stairs, need their neighbors to go to the hydrants for them. But as of Friday afternoon, Mayor Bloomberg was saying that the I.N.G. New York City Marathon was still on. More than two hundred thousand of Con Edison’s customers in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island—and that’s customers, not individual people; if individual people were tallied, the number would be much higher—are without electricity, and Con Ed says they may not have it back for another ten days. But as of Friday afternoon, Mayor Bloomberg was saying that the I.N.G. New York City Marathon was still on. And though electricity has just come back to much of downtown Manhattan, in other parts, it remains off, and even when it does return, some buildings will continue to be without it for who knows how long. But as of Friday afternoon, Mayor Bloomberg was saying that the I.N.G. New York City Marathon was still on.

Around 5 P.M. E.T., the news broke that officials had, finally, decided to cancel the race—or, perhaps, to postpone it for later in the year. It was the right decision, but it took far too long to make.

Like him or not, Mike Bloomberg has, overall, done a pretty good job as the mayor of New York City. Sure, he has his crusades, some of which are worth supporting, but the job of a mayor, especially here, is far more about administration than politics, and the guy just plain knows how to run things. But in his policies, he’s always favored a certain kind of person—the rich, or at least the upper middle class—over the people who struggle with the costs of living in New York City.

Now there’s Sandy, and the response to it, both of which—because they come as his third and presumably final term is winding down—may end up defining much of Bloomberg’s legacy—as 9/11 did Rudy Giuliani’s. To his credit, Bloomberg has been a steady, comforting presence throughout this crisis. But what we’ve seen over the past week is the absolute worst of Bloomberg’s tendency toward favoring corporations and the well-to-do over people in need, which was epitomized, finally, in his stubborn insistence that the marathon would proceed as scheduled.

Bloomberg had his justifications, of course. At a press conference on Friday, a few hours before the cancellation news, he cited Giuliani’s support for the marathon in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks. “I think Rudy had it right,” he said. “You keep going; you have to do things. You can grieve, you can cry, you can laugh, all at the same time. That’s what human beings are good at.”

It’s a seductive argument, maybe even a reasonable one. The city needs to come together, show that it’s bowed but not broken. There’s something to that. But 2001’s marathon took place almost two months after 9/11, not less than a week after it. The city needs to finish the tangible things—it needs to help all of its people—before it can focus on the emotional ones.

And Bloomberg was promising that running the marathon would not take away resources that could go to Sandy’s victims. There is no way—simply no way—that could be true.

Let’s assume, for a moment, that by Sunday everything in the city is back to normal. Everyone has power back, everyone has water back. Everyone’s houses are fixed. Even if that were the case—and it sure as hell won’t be—the amount of stuff available to the organization that puts on the marathon, the New York Road Runners, that could instead have gone to helping people struggling after the storm is stunning.

The N.Y.R.R. says that it will donate a million dollars to Sandy’s victims—maybe more—which is a nice gesture. But that donation looks petty compared to the tremendous thing the group could have done simply by cancelling the marathon earlier in the week and diverting the supplies for the race to those in need. The New York Post has already noted the massive portable generators set up in Central Park, which, the Post says, are big “enough to power 400 homes in ravaged areas like Staten Island, the Rockaways and downtown Manhattan.” And that’s just the beginning. At the start of a typical race, sponsor Poland Spring provides more than ninety thousand eight-ounce bottles of water, plus more than sixty thousand gallons more along the way. That water could have gone to the people in Breezy Point, or to those getting water from hydrants, or those without any at all. Or the N.Y.R.R. could have relinquished the twenty-five hundred portable toilets it will put in place on Sunday, giving people without running water some dignity, or at least a way to save their drinking water for drinking, rather than flushing. The Bowery Mission, a shelter in Lower Manhattan, is asking for donations of iced tea and Gatorade as an alternative to serving only water to its clients. Presumably other shelters are asking the same thing. Maybe N.Y.R.R. could have spared some of the thirty thousand or so gallons of Gatorade it distributes each year? And surely there are people out there who, after a very long week, would have appreciated even one of the cans of beer earmarked for the pre-race dinner, out of the eighteen thousand cans provided last year?

Even beyond that, there were other reasons why it should have been blindingly obvious that the race needed to be cancelled, or at least postponed. In a typical year, about fifteen hundred police officers—one thousand full-time cops, plus five hundred auxiliary officers, according to the Times—work the marathon. Almost two hundred sanitation workers are needed as well. There are, surely, better places for all of them to be this year. Even if there weren’t, we know that overtime costs for the police who help with the marathon alone (never mind the sanitation workers) average about three million dollars every year, even without a disaster having led to long working hours for law enforcement in the week leading up to the race. And we know, too, that, unrelated to Sandy, this is the first year that N.Y.R.R. has been required to contribute to those costs. But they reportedly only expected to pay about $2.5 million in fees to the city.

There are, undoubtedly, some people who were planning to run who will be disappointed, even crushed by this decision. They shouldn’t be criticized for that, just as they shouldn’t have been criticized for participating in the race if it had gone on. This is something that people work toward for months, if not years. (Nick Thompson has more on what a runner goes through in preparing for a marathon.) Some of them do it to raise money for charity. And it’s expensive to enter. If the race is on, it’s on—you have to participate, or throw that work and that money away. The failure here was institutional. For days, Bloomberg and N.Y.R.R.—and N.Y.R.R.’s sponsors—were the ones making the wrong decision. They corrected it just in time to keep from losing New York City’s support.